Stan Kelly-Bootle [ to Carolyn Kunin..."I find most of
what VN writes here incomprehensible, but I am not a native Russian speaker.
..What the hell does that mean??"] "...your question is a timely
reminder that ‘fluency’ in English does not guarantee that one can always
readily understand something written in English by a ‘fluent-in-English’ writer.
We’ve all been agonizing over ‘translating’ between different languages, but
it’s helpful to ponder those often equally vexing problems facing communications
between two ‘natively-fluent’ speakers in the same tongue. [ ] I
think VN is in superb form throughout this essay[ ]The final sentence does
have subtle ambiguities but they are interesting, under control and typically
Nabokovian....[ ] it’s damned-near impossible (some linguists/philosophers go
further and declare it totally impossible) to avoid unintended ambiguities in
Natural Language discourse. Right away, I’m exposed to this very risk! [...] But
life is too short for endless digressions, and we must accept that with
tolerance and practice, we can formulate close-enough approximations — let’s
call them useful ‘gists.’
Jansy Mello: How extremely nice to hear from you
again at the VN-L and in full steam.
Communication between two non 'natively-fluent' speakers, as well as
the one between those who are, is as complicated as communicating with
ourselves (heart and mind, Jekyll and Hyde, etc) The gist of the matter, as you
point out, is often submerged by all sorts of squabblings and
false misunderstandings (ars longa, vita brevis?).
In relation to the "version" V.Nabokov chose to keep hidden the idea
of confronting a "perfect poem = perfect love/muse" is, apparently,
sustained. However, Carolyn (off line) unearthed a
divergent opinion,* with one element in it that carries us back to
VN's bouts of misoginy (referring to Emma Bovary's vulgarity, or Lolita's,
being veiled by love or artistic talent): "the perfection with which
[Pushkin] endows its banality" and another that stands in opposition to
VN: the transcendent aspect of what is "ineffable" (i.e: it cannot be "effed" -
and here I'm considering its wondrous ambiguity ).
.............................................................................................................................
* - C.Kunin: In case you are still interested in
"Ja pomiu chewednoyay" I did finally find John Bayley's book on Pushkin
[ ]. Like me, he doesn't think it is a sincere homage to Anna Kern,
whose sexual character, what we used to call a woman's reputation, was not
pristine [ ].Bayley says of the poem "it has a kind of mischievously
meaningful solipsism,' playing with the artifice of french sentimental poetry
"and the perfection with which [Pushkin] endows its banality seems exactly to
express his awareness of the nature of his relation to the girl to whom it is
addressed." [ ]Bayley's interpretation of the subject of the poem is
"time lost, wasted and regained" - close to my "age and loss of memory which in
the end is overcome ..." [A]nyone interested in a short exegesis of the poem
will find it in that book.
Cf. Bayley, John "Pushkin, A Comparative
Commentary" (1971), Cambridge University
Press